Ethics-Committee of the Faculty of Theology and the Study of Religion

The Ethics-Committee of the Faculty of Theology and the Study of Religion is responsible for ethical review of research-projects, which are conducted within the Faculty. It's members have been elected by the Faculty-Assembly and are not bound by directives in their practice.

A vote from the ethics committee may be necessary when applying for research funding (e.g., from the Swiss National Science Foundation) or in connection with the publication of research results in a scientific journal. This is especially true if the research project involves research with human subjects (e.g., interview or observation studies). The ethics committee can also be asked for an advisory opinion on the planning of empirical research projects involving human subjects, even if a formal opinion is not explicitly required.

To assess whether it is recommended to seek an evaluation of a research project by the ethics committee, the "Data Protection and Ethics Self-Assessment Tool" (DESAT) of the University of Zurich should be consulted beforehand. DESAT is accessible to all UZH researchers via the "Contract Management for Third-Party Funds" (AVA) portal as a standalone module:

Log in to AVA at https://ava.uzh.ch/en-US
Create a "New Project" (click the button at the top right)
Enter the title of the research project and click "Create Project"
In the overview, click on "DESAT" (bottom of the left column)
Follow the instructions in the questionnaire – for the ethics application, it is sufficient to complete the (shorter) ethics part; however, we also recommend that you review the data protection aspects of your project using DESAT.
Please save the documentation of DESAT. It is part of the request for an ethics vote.

If you do not have a UZH login, you can alternatively use the following checklist: checklist (PDF, 69 KB).

UZH Policy on ethical review for research on and with human participants.

Requests

Requests can be submitted on an ongoing basis tosekretariat@sozethik.uzh.ch.

Please bear in mind that the process of preparing an ethics vote can take up to three months.

For the request, please submit the following documents and, if possible, merge them into one pdf file:

DESAT result protocol (see above)
Request form (DOCX, 57 KB) (DOCX, 55 KB)
Attachments (detailed discussion according to the form, information sheets, consent forms, etc.)

Further information on the application process can be found in the guidelines (PDF, 140 KB)(PDF, 237 KB).

Only in the event that you should not have UZH access to DESAT, we are providing you with the old detailed application documents below:

Checklist (PDF, 129 KB) (old)

request form (PDF, 133 KB) (old)

guidelines (PDF, 119 KB) (old)